


Executive Reform

by karanguni



Category: Final Fantasy VII, Pacific Rim (2013)
Genre: AU, Crossover, Gen, random guest appearances
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2014-05-30
Updated: 2016-01-18
Packaged: 2018-01-27 03:23:21
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 6
Words: 17,625
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1713131
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/karanguni/pseuds/karanguni
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Midgar is the base; Shinra the company that builds Jaegers. The <em>kaijuu</em> are coming. Sometimes, wars have to be fought on all fronts.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Engineering. Urban Development. Software.  Oil and Coal.

**Author's Note:**

> This was entirely the brainchild of a prompt from Elementalsight. The more-than-excellent crimson-sun drew up some amazing [fanart](http://risingoflights.tumblr.com/post/85807222566/for-karaguni-inspired-by-her-ffvii-pacific-rim) that you should go see here.

**Engineering**

'This is an excellent Jaeger,' Dr. Hojo said to Scarlet. The two of them were in the primary engineering bay, looking up at Shinra's latest mechanical masterpiece. It cast a bulky, boxy, ugly shadow.

'No,' Scarlet said slowly as she tapped the heel of her boot a few loud and judgemental times against the concrete floor. ' _That_ is a piece of shit.’

'Do we have to do this now, fifteen million gil later?' Hojo asked.

'Yes,' Scarlet said. 'Because we _should_ have done it before, _fifty_ million gil _earlier_. Did you even bother looking through Weapons’ design prototypes, or did you just go straight to the welding shit together stage?’

'I'm terribly sorry that developing advanced mako reactors takes up so much of my time,' Hojo drawled, pushing his glasses up the bridge of his nose. It was either a loud cry for help, or a shout of aggravation. 'Let's be very honest with each other, Scarlet, shall we?'

'Please, let's do,' Scarlet said, her smile a long, vicious scar across her face. Hojo turned to face her fully. 'That,' he said, gesturing at the Jaeger with his clipboard, 'is a fifteen million gil miracle, considering that the company's current preoccupation is saving Junon from tumbling into the sea.'

'Junon's going to tumble into the sea anyway,' Scarlet said. 'It's been fucked so many times that it's just one big, pointless PR exercise trying to save that base. It's scrap metal masquerading as a port.'

'Be that as it may,' Hojo said, not disagreeing, 'leaving a few tens of thousands of people to fend for themselves is not considered correct, and Shinra does try so hard to be correct these days.'

Scarlet didn’t bother to point out the ways in which she probably disagreed with the policy, but she did stare at Hojo for a long moment. ‘Giving us fifteen million for the development of a Jaeger,’ she said finally, ‘is like saying you’re willing to pay five gil for reconstructive heart surgery.’

Hojo shrugged. ‘You’re preaching to the choir.’

'Does it have cannons?'

'Some.'

'Does it have any new offensive capability?'

'No.'

'Can it fucking _move?_ ’

'Probably,' Hojo said, then amended, 'or possibly. It was built as a replacement for the Rude-Reno team.'

'Oh, fucking alien motherfuck on a fucking fuck stick,' Scarlet surmised, eloquent as always.

'Indeed,' Hojo nodded.

They both turned to regard the Jaeger. It was, at least, finished enough that the crews working fifteen floors above in the upper bays were more - as it were - putting the finishing touches (armour plating) on than they were hot glue gunning on crucial bits.

'What a piece of shit,' Hojo hummed. 'Do you know how many times I've had to reinvent the laws of physics to keep this whole project afloat?'

'As many times as I've kicked the asses of new recruits, I imagine.'

'Quite so. And I'm sure you'll empathise about the fact that, if it were ever to be peacetime ever again, I'd be a billionaire a hundred times over from any number of patents that I could file if things like patents existed anymore.'

'Yes,' Scarlet sighed, tucking her hands into the pockets of her jumper uniform. 'And I'd be equally as rich. And have nicer nails. But that's not the reality of it, is it? The truth is, we're now the goddamned good guys.' She gave the foot of the prototype Jaeger a solid kick. Her boots were metal toed, and pinged off harmlessly. 'What a fucking joke.'

'Less a joke,' Hojo corrected, 'more like irony. Or karmic justice, if that's your cup of tea. Come on,' he said, handing her the clipboard. 'I'm sure you'll have even more choice words for me when you look through the actual specs.'

Scarlet took the clipboard. ‘Don’t care about the specs,’ she said, flipping past them to the pilot evals on the back pages. ‘What about Rude?’

'The Kaiju are coming,' Hojo said. 'He'll have to deal with the fact that Reno is gone whether he likes it or not.'

* * *

**Urban Development**

'I don't want to talk to you,' Reeve said when Hojo walked into his office.

'You never want to talk to me,' Hojo said, placidly taking a seat in one of the beaten up metal chairs at the front of Reeve's desk.

'That's because whenever we talk,' Reeve said, rolling up the map he'd been looking at with an air of exhausted resignation, 'we argue.'

'Come now,' Hojo chided the man. 'We argue because that's what people who compete for scarce resources have to do to get their jobs done.'

Reeve collapsed into a chair of his own and put a hand over his eyes. They hurt from hours of looking at schematics, screens, maps, tables. ‘Hojo, what do you want?’

'Believe it or not,' Hojo told him, 'I'm here to see how you're doing.' Reeve cracked open an eyelid and stared at the doctor. 'Fine,' Hojo conceded, 'I may also be here to check on how the relocation efforts are going. I'd like to have some idea of how many people are still on the dead plains.'

'What a name,' Reeve sighed, straightening and reaching for the map he'd been looking at. The area Hojo was concerned about spanned the northern coastal stretch from Junon through to east of Kalm, and extended all the way to the continental divide. The mountains were the only real natural barrier that stopped kaiju; anyone who tried to make a life on the plains were likely to find themselves attacked either from the bounded sea to the west or the larger ocean to the east. Dead plains. Reeve shook his head. 'Those plains are some of the most viable and fertile agricultural lands on the western side of this continent.'

'Alas, while I am sure that dead bodies make excellent fertiliser, they don't make very good farmers,' Hojo said.

'Alas, without farmers,' Reeve replied, 'we'll eventually have more dead bodies.'

Hojo crossed his legs, impatient. His lab coat he’d long swapped out for workman’s overalls. Instead of dye marks, they were dirty with grease. ‘Urban Development and Engineering needn’t be in a pissing contest over who saves more lives. Either I fail to build enough Jaegers and everyone gets killed, or you fail in population relocation and everyone dies of starvation. Wonderful. We’re such martyrs, the two of us. Should I applaud?’

'I have so many things to say about what Science used to get up to before it became _Engineering_ ,’ Reeve said, viciously civil as he put the map down on the table. ‘But I think you and Hollander have suffered enough about the SOLDIER project.’

'You'd be one of very few people to think that,' Hojo murmured, very quietly. Reeve cast him a glance. 'That was a low blow,' he admitted.

'No,' Hojo shook his head. 'It was perfectly truthful. But I didn't come here to talk about whether I've learned my lesson.' He nodded at the map. 'Tell me about the situation.'

Reeve ran a hand through his hair. It was greasy from lack of showering, but showering — and sleep, and food and the rest — took up relatively too much time these days. ‘Well,’ he said, gesturing at the plains as a whole. ‘There’s Midgar. Anyone who hasn’t already moved out of the city won’t be moving anytime soon; they’ll go down with this ship. The WRO’s evacuated about half of the people within thirty miles of any coastline, and Shinra continues to bore into the mountains. The rest of the coastal evacuation will go faster, now that the new rail line is up, but resources are tight. The WRO does what it can, but we’re still the main provender of raw materials. And you know how that goes.’

'Ah, the WRO,' Hojo murmured. 'How is Ms. Lockhart?'

'She wouldn't want me to tell you, I'm guessing,' Reeve smiled tightly. 'So, all right, I'd say.'

'It's a comfort to know that we'll have a thirty mile deadzone soon, Midgar excluded,' Hojo nodded. 'Now my next question: where is Veld?'

'You have a PHS,' Reeve growled, instantly on guard. 'Use it.'

‘ _You_ have spies everywhere,’ Hojo volleyed back. ‘And I’m using you like the company resource you are. Veld doesn’t pick up calls from Weapons or Engineering. So tell me where our dear Director is, and I’ll soon leave you alone.’

Reeve crossed his arms over his chest. ‘Recruitment has its own office down the hall —’

Hojo cut him off. ‘Recruitment doesn’t like to talk to Weapons or Engineering.’

'Maybe your departments should co-operate more.'

'Oh, for god's sake!' Hojo slammed one hand on the table. It was so uncharacteristic a loss of temper that Reeve felt his mouth click reflexively closed. 'No individual, much less _department_ , wants anything to do with _anyone_ who used to be part of Shinra’s Science arm, and you know perfectly well why that is the case. There’s a reason why Recruitment and Weapons never let their shiny new recruits anywhere near my team until all the papers have been signed: the SOLDIER project was an enormous fuck up. I might acknowledge now that we went too far, but nobody else cares what I _acknowledge_.’ Hojo stopped. Reeve slowly unclenched his fingers from the fist he’d unconsciously curled them into.

When Hojo spoke again, his voice had regained some semblance of his usual aloof control. ‘Our experiments with JENOVA may have precipitated the Kaiju, but it’s also our work that keeps them at bay. And while I am very good at building Jaegers, I am not very good at piloting them. Right now, I have a Jaeger that could do better than to sit in a hanger. So tell me where Veld is, because while Scarlet is content to run through dozens of green recruits in hope that someone can Drift, I prefer to go the tried and tested route.’

Reeve saw the dots start to connect. ‘You want Veld to get Tseng back,’ he said, disbelieving. Hojo just smiled a tight smile. ‘You’re out of your mind.’

'Oh,' Hojo shook his head, 'no. That was all in the past. Insane scientists are very out of fashion now; I've since settled for mad engineer.'

'You'll have a hell of a time convincing Veld to hand his folk hero over,' Reeve said, duly impressed. 'Tseng's one of the few reasons why Shinra actually manages to recruit anybody for the pilot program.'

'Well, it's time he stopped being a travelling museum exhibit,' Hojo said, standing. 'It's getting worse.'

Reeve stilled. ‘How much worse?’

'Bad enough that our glorious leader is flying in a much-armoured military helicopter,' Hojo said, 'to Wutai.'

'Ah,' Reeve said. It was a very verbose “ah.”

'Ah,' Hojo echoed. 'Better start building those underground mountain fortresses, Tuesti.'

Then came the strange moment when neither man knew what to do; Hojo stood in the doorway, not sure when the right moment was to leave, and Reeve had one hand in a pocket, fingers curled around his PHS.

'I can't say that I've ever approved of what you did about Sephiroth, or with SOLDIER in general.' Reeve said, finally breaking the silence.

'No one ever asked you for approval,' Hojo said, with quiet force.

'But what happened after SOLDIER, no one could've predicted,' Reeve continued. 'Nobody expected that JENOVA was just the first, or that the kaijuu would react so violently to their genetic legacy.'

'I didn't come in here for tea and sympathy,' Hojo snapped, stepping out the door.

'I'll get you a vehicle and tell you where Veld is,' Reeve said. Hojo turned back. 'But,' the director of Urban Development said, holding up one hand, 'you have to answer me this question.'

'What is it?'

'Have you ever thought of naming a Jaeger _Beowulf?’_

* * *

'You're calling it the _Beowulf_ , as in, Beowulf-who-fights-the-grendel-and-then-realises-it-has-a-much-larger-mother-who-wants-to-kill-him-now _Beowulf_ fame?’ Scarlet asked, two days later. ‘Is _that_ your idea of irony? Plus, you’re going on a, what, _road trip_ to chase down what’s left of the original members of Administrative Research?’

'Yes,' Hojo said, with great dignity as he got into the armoured car that Reeve had requisitioned for him. Elena was his driver, because he figured he could use all the help he could get.

'Wow,' Scarlet said, stepping back as the car started to pull away. As the blast doors opened to reveal a crack of open blue sky, Hojo heard her yell, 'Whatever you're smoking, share some with me when you get back!' and managed to crack a smile.

* * *

**Software**

'Professor Hojo,' Elena asked him after they'd passed what felt like the sixteen thousandth water station; steam engines were thirsty things. The road they were taking to Kalm ran parallel to the railway line that had been hastily thrown up to help move supplies along the coast. Parts of it were now almost a decade old, but a good number of sections were brand new. Kaijuu were rarely ever considerate about Shinra's infrastructure.

Hojo, who had been rather enjoying the quiet of the last few hours, sighed. People always wanted to talk. ‘Yes?’

'Why, exactly, am I coming with you on this trip?' Elena asked him, eyes still fixed on the road.

'You're one of our top programmers; why wouldn't you be coming with me?'

'It's not like the colonel and the Director don't _understand_ the Drift,’ she pointed out. ‘They’ve collectively clocked more hours than half our other pilots combined.’

'That's because half of our pilots have the unhappy habit of dying,' Hojo corrected her, because statistics lied. Veld and Tseng had been very, very good, but they were just two men in a long line of rangers — and, before that, SOLDIERs. 'Anyway,' he went on, shaking the thought. 'Don't call him _colonel_ when we get there.’

'That's his rank,' Elena said. 'And we're basically military at this point.'

'That's the rank he was given when he became part of Veld's travelling circus,' Hojo corrected her. 'He hates it. He'd rather be a major forever, like all the other pilots.'

'Oh,' Elena said quietly, fingers flexing on the steering wheel. 'I didn't know that.'

Hojo shrugged. ‘You wouldn’t have. You’re only, what, twenty… five now?’

'Twenty-three.'

Hojo snorted. ‘You’re practically still a baby. No, you still had your nose firmly in your books when Tseng and his partner had their faces splashed on every pin-up from Kalm to Gongaga.’

'I've worked with Maj. Kris for almost three years now and he still doesn't want to talk about it,' Elena said.

'I'm not surprised,' Hojo said. Kris — or just _the major_ to most of the pilots — had been one half of Midgar’s greatest Drift team alongside Tseng; they’d been the first really good connection that had lasted; piloted the Jaeger that took down the first few waves of kaijuu, back when kaijuu were distant nightmares instead of a horrible, unending reality. Their team had been Shinra’s new face: the good guys, the monster-killers. ‘The major — now there’s a real folk hero for you,’ Hojo muttered. ‘He wasn’t Administrative Research, you know, even though he has a mind like a steel trap and Veld, in his previous life, would’ve killed to get a man like him into the Turk corps.’

'He wasn't Shinra before he became a ranger?' Elena asked, surprised. Hojo realised, suddenly, that Elena had probably thought that every one of the older pilots had been Shinra down to the bone — the late Reno, Rude, Veld, Valentine before he quit, Cissnei, and others in the long, long list of Turks that had become pilots after the SOLDIER program had self-imploded.

'Oh, no,' Hojo said, a little tickled by the fact that there were actual _generations_ to this war now. ‘And if things hadn’t changed, he’d never have become Shinra, not in a thousand years. Can’t you sense something different about him?’

'Well,' Elena said awkwardly. 'He's in a wheelchair. That's pretty different.'

'No, you silly girl,' Hojo sighed. 'Next time, pay attention to the fact that that man actually has read books and still owns, in this apocalyptic world of ours, nice clothes. The major came from money — Costa Del Sol and rub-shoulders-with-Rufus type money. If he'd wanted to, he could've fucked off over the mountains with the first batch of Dons and rich industrialists. His family probably has a designer bunker that they sit around in all day as they wait for this war to end. _That’s_ why their partnership was so special. It was a gift from heaven to our public image. Can you imagine it?’ Hojo mused. ‘A volunteer from Midgar’s elite _and_ a reformed Shinra employee, getting into a Jaeger and then chain-defeating kaijuu after kaijuu; we’d never had so many recruits as when they led the program. A rich boy comes down from above all the sectors,’ the professor marvelled, ‘and willingly joins the team.’

'I… didn't know any of that,' Elena said, sounding a little put out.

'It's not like we keep an archive of our propaganda posters lying around the base,' Hojo reassured her. 'Don't take it personally. I doubt the major really wants to talk to you about the good old days back when he had legs.'

'He has legs!' Elena objected. 'They just don't work very well. And that doesn't matter,' she said, voice rising just a little. 'He's the best co-ordinator that pilots could ask for, and knows more about Drifting than anyone who isn't on the engineering or software teams.'

'Hackles down, no need to defend him,' Hojo said. 'I was simply telling you a story about how war changed the face of classical economics. In the past, you'd never have seen men with university educations fighting on any frontline.'

Elena put her foot down on the accelarator. ‘ _I_ have a university education, and received a doctorate in almost as little time as you did, professor.’

'No, _you_ are the bought-and-paid-for product of one of Shinra’s very specific, very particular training programs. People with “university educations” were people who had the time to sit about a beautiful, multi-million gil campus and make friends with other well-connected people. They became bankers, research assistants, later doctors and hedge fund managers and casino owners and real estate moguls. _You_ _,_ Major - or do you prefer Dr.? - Elena, were trained vocationally, for a profession — of course you got your qualifications in record time. You’re an offspring of wartime, though you are very talented besides. I always read your “papers”, when they show up on the intranet, with great interest.’

Elena’s grip on the steering wheel was now very tight, and the railway beside them was whizzing by with almost alarming quickness. ‘To answer your earlier question,’ Hojo said, off-handed. ‘I need a programmer to assure Tseng that the Drift and Jaeger systems are somewhat more advanced than when he last sat in the pilot’s seat. It was a choice between taking you, or taking Scarlet, and it would’ve been rather bad form to leave with two Shinra head of departments but only come back with one.’

'I can't say I don't understand where Scarlet is coming from, Professor,' Elena ground out.

'Reality is harsh, and I'm not a nice man,' Hojo shrugged. 'Truthfully, Elena, people like you, with your smiles and the care you take with rank and politeness and form — people like you make me a little sick.' He held up a pre-emptive hand. 'And that's a good thing. I think it's a marvel that you can live in the control tower with one of our most broken of toys coding till your eyes are gummed over and _still_ find the energy to care. I, on the other hand, am an elderly gentleman, robbed of his lab coat and set in his ways. I’ve got too much bitterness to ever want to be part of optimistically named organisations like the WRO, who run around shipping civilians and opening oil mines. But I’ve got nothing but my own ambitions to blame for that, and if I ever left Shinra, I expect I’d end up an alcoholic within the year. So if I can spend my days wilfully tuning piles of gil into robots, I am happy enough to spend my days at the head of an engineering army, living free when most of Midgar thinks I should be hanged for bait. It’s not easy being the enemy, you know: enemies should be black and white, not useful or truthful or clever. I’m glad the kaijuu have taken over that role for me.’

'I don't know,' Elena confessed, fifteen minutes later when they'd both recovered from that speech, 'whether to like you or to slap you.'

'You think about slapping me enough times when we have code reviews,' Hojo shrugged. It was one of the reasons why working with Elena and Scarlet made life interesting. 'Save the energy, and just tolerate me instead.'

More silence.

'And by the way,' Hojo added, as the outskirts of Kalm finally started to come into view. 'That's the other reason I'm bringing you with me.'

'What?'

'You care about your work. That's the best rhetoric we've got.'

* * *

**Oil and Coal**

'I,' Elena admitted as they stood on the threshold of the mine, 'was not expecting this.'

'Claustrophobic?' Hojo asked, flicking on his headlamp. He gestured towards the well-used and dirty lift cage before them. 'Well, I'd have worn overalls. Let's go.'

The Mythril Mine wasn’t a wide expanse: it was an underground labyrinth. Its domain was down. With the premature death of mako, the mine’s coal had metamorphosed more or less overnight into black gold. What Shinra had killed fifty years before, its Jaeger program and associated infrastructure needs had revived in less than a decade. The seams of Kalm were reopened; the bottom of the main shaft now sat almost half a kilometre beneath the surface.

They were in only one of a dozen elevators that fed people into the deep. The lift wasn’t particularly quick. ‘How much longer before we hit the bottom, do you think?’ Elena asked. They saw occasional flashes of light from pathways that cut deep, perpendicular stripes outwards, but those passageways quickly disappeared.

'A while,' Hojo said. 'The mine itself is 45 square miles, and ever since the first attacks the industrious men of Kalm have bored living space and bunkers into about a hundred more. Assuming their ventilation shafts and supplies of food and water are never compromised, this is the only city on the Dead Plains that might survive the kaijuu indefinitely.'

'Do they ever lose anyone down here?' Elena tried to peer downwards, but could see nothing and heard only the steady clanking of gears. 'That sounds immense.'

'It is immense. There are only two real reasons why more of Midgar hasn't already moved here. One, no person from Kalm can abide idle hands while no one from the city can bear to dirty them; two - the darkness can drive even slumdwellers mad. Other than that, it's probably not all bad. The mine cars run on a subway system that's, last I heard from our own ever-interfering Mr. Tuesti, at least four times more complicated than Midgar's own. Here we are.' The elevator ground to a halt, and the lift cage opened to abandon them at the bottom of the shaft. 'Don't let the noise disturb you.'

Hojo and Elena kept pace together as they walked, both of them subconsciously never straying more than a few steps apart from the other. There was a permanent, distant roar from the direction that they were walking away from. It echoed off the walls, which themselves seemed to vibrate. Single bulbs in industrial cages hung from the ceiling in regular intervals, casting a deep orange light everywhere.

'You can fully upright here,' Elena commented suddenly, when they'd been walking for almost fifteen minutes. 'There's headroom to spare. No one would need to stoop.'

'Residential mine tunnels offer very little else,' Hojo agreed, his voice bouncing oddly off the high walls. 'That's one dignity I guess the miners decided they could afford to restore to their people.'

They fell back into an almost companionable silence again. Every now and then, the humming of the equipment stopped, and voices pinged back and forth in the darkness. While it should have been reassuring to hear other humans about, it was more disconcerting. One had the sensation of being both cut off and surrounded on all sides. The great noise was really a chorus: a continuous miner would be carving out tunnels while a long-wall shearer ripped tonnes and tonnes of coal rubble out, ready to be dumped onto conveyor belts and into shuttles. The operations never stopped; shifts just changed every 8 hours. The vibrations beneath Hojo and Elena’s feet hadn’t stopped for 9 years.

Finally, two miles later, they reached a door that opened up into a large hall-sized cavity. The support structure was well-hidden: this was a well-loved place, and there were many people walking about. Not all of them were in mining gear; there were children, grocers. Some effort had been put in to get natural-coloured, full-spectrum lights hung from the ceiling in huge, sun-like chandeliers.

'What a market,' Elena marvelled. 'It's nicer than some of the ones in Midgar or even in Edge.'

'They get stepped on by monsters less often,' Hojo said, stopping by a woman selling bread and buying some buns from her. He gave one to Elena, ate one himself, and tucked the remaining two away in his bag. 'Less tourism, more work. Let's keep moving.'

Passageways opened up in the cardinal directions, and Hojo beckoned for Elena to follow him down one that had a temporary sign, reading JAEGER RECRUITMENT PROGRAMME, hung up beside it.

'Great piece of public relations, that Jaeger logo,' Hojo murmured under his breath to her as they looked for the room where Veld and his recruiters were located. 'Can you imagine if we'd put Shinra on it instead?'

'They will one day, you know, Professor,' Elena muttered back. 'When all of this is over, I'm sure we'll be more than happy to inform everyone who won the war.'

'Hope springs eternal with you, doesn't it?' But Hojo said nothing else, because they'd arrived. The recruitment team had been given an entire room — doubtlessly a privilege considering the circumstances — and, by the looks of the number of young begrimed boys and girls hanging around a stoic-looking Tseng, was having no trouble getting the locals to take the bait. He was in full folk-hero attire: the formal Jaeger ranger uniform, black with deep red piping down the legs; on his shoulders, red and gold stripes and a star for his rank.

Veld was standing at the front of two tables that were draped with heavy tablecloths and stacked with all sorts of Jaeger propaganda. And, like a universal constant, the man was in a suit. The only nods to wartime were the awarded colours on his chest; a nice and definitive way of saying Veld’d been on the frontlines. He was talking to someone.

'Oh, damn,' Hojo swore.

'Oh, my,' Elena said.

'What are you doing here,' Vincent Valentine, of first-generation-Jaeger fame, asked them. His voice gave everyone in the room the distinct impression that it would be better off for them if they were somewhere else sometime soon.

'Shit,' Veld swore, catching sight of them as well. 'Okay, Tseng, you handle the booth for a while, I'm taking them to go talk in private,' he called to the ex-pilot, who looked torn between relief at being rescued from his admirers and a faint disappointment at missing what was probably going to be quite a show.

'No, no,' Hojo smiled, the movement of his lips setting his face into an old expression of schadenfreude-inspired amusement. 'I think it might be for the best that Tseng stays. Maybe even for the best if you shut down your booth for the day.'

'Everybody,' Veld called out to the room in general, eyes fixed on Hojo. 'We'll be taking a break for an hour. Please come back then.'

As the people filtered out, Vincent threw down the gauntlet. ’Professor Hojo,’ he said. His voice was without inflection, but his choice of words made up for it. ‘How are you these days? Find anything interesting in the guts of kaijuu to inject into people?’

Hojo’s smile widened. ‘Valentine,’ he said, all pleasantry. ‘I was never once put in charge of kaijuu research, nor have I ever asked to be.’

Vincent raised an eyebrow. ‘Why? Did you actually _learn_ from what’s happened to Sephiroth, or did you just want to save yourself from the temptation of experimentation?’

'Couldn't say,' Hojo shrugged. 'More likely the latter. How is oil prospecting going for you? I'm not sure the hazard pay is quite as good. You've always let me down, Vincent, so I can't sa—'

'YOU SHUT UP ABOUT VINCENT,' a brand new and very young voice burst out. Hojo turned, looked down, and saw a girl who had evidently not thought it prudent to get out while the adult's talked. 'POOPYFACE,' she screamed.

'Marlene,' Vincent sighed.

'OIL IS AWESOME,' Marlene continued, poking Hojo right in the bellybutton. He flinched, and saw Elena and Veld try not to laugh. 'And Vincent is really good at helping us find oil. So shut up!'

Vincent took the few strides necessary to come and sweep Marlene up.

'Do you see this cloak?' she continued to hiss at Hojo, patting the somewhat garish piece of clothing that Vincent had apparently taken to wearing. 'He took the Midgar Zolom, and _turned it into a cloak_.’ She smiled, childishly satisfied and triumphant.

'Thank you, Marlene,' Vincent said, softly. He shot a look back at Shinra employees in the room. 'Veld,' he acknowledged, dipping his head. 'You know where to find me if you want me. Otherwise Barrett and I will be leaving tomorrow.'

'Let's go find daddy,' Marlene commanded, and the two of them left.

'Well,' Hojo said in their wake. 'I see that the WRO's propaganda machine has been hard at work indeed.'

'Hojo,' Veld said, warningly. 'Enough provoking.'

'All I did was enter the room.'

Veld crossed his arms. ‘That _is_ provoking. What are you doing all the way here in Kalm?’

Hojo pointed at Tseng. ‘I need him for a Jaeger.’

Tseng closed his one good eye, seemed to count to ten, then opened it again. ‘I’m retired. Out of commission. In your own words, “damaged goods”.’

'Only because you refused an endless number of Drift compatible co-pilots,' Hojo sang. 'Your eye, we fixed. Your shoulder, we fixed. We rigged up entire new systems that Elena,' he nodded at the hither-to silent programmer, 'fixed.'

'We did,' she agreed. 'Though, before the professor goes on, I'd like to say that I probably don't agree with anything he says, sirs.'

'— thank you, Doctor,' Hojo said, and then turned back to Tseng. 'Your unwillingness, though, _that_ I never could fix.’

'You don't know what it's like to have a man you trust ripped screaming out of your head and then have him shoved back in a moment later, half-broken, Professor,' Tseng said. Veld was thus far silent. Tseng added, 'Because I doubt you've trusted any man enough, or that any man would want to be in your head.'

'True on both counts, but I don't need to know,' Hojo said, reaching into the bag that he had brought all the way from Midgar. 'Do you know what happened when the Sephiroth-Genesis team fought _Teufel_?’

Veld had had enough. ‘Besides the catastrophic loss of one of our first Jaegers, the knowledge that you and Hollander had made JENOVA clones becoming public knowledge, and our realising that JENOVA was just the tip of an extra-terrestrial iceberg; _besides_ Genesis losing his mind in that pod and Angeal taking his own life thereafter? _Besides_ whatever it is you now have made Sephiroth into?’ the Director asked, his voice rising. ‘Hojo, you’ve hidden something worse than that, haven’t you?’

'I wouldn't say _hidden_.’

'Tell us what it is!' Veld roared. 'Tell me why you're here coming for a pilot that hasn't been in the saddle for two years. I'm not blind and I'm not dumb: _what is it_ _that’s gone wrong now._ ’

Hojo paused; pushed his glasses up his nose. Elena breathed again. Tseng readjusted his stance. The professor handed the report that he’d taken out of his bag to the Director. ‘When Genesis threw himself — threw his Jaeger into _Teufel_ ,’ Hojo began, ‘for a brief moment, they Drifted.’

'No,' Elena said, understanding suddenly and wishing she didn't. 'The Jaegar pilots and the kaijuu, they Drifted? That's impossible.'

'You know it's not impossible,' Hojo said. 'You've been building systems your entire life and seeing exactly how it is possible.'

'The JENOVA clones; or anyone really injected with the JENOVA cells. Before Shinra realised how flawed the SOLDIER programme was, they'd had Drift compatibility scores of the like that have never been seen since,' Elena said. 'We always thought that the cells somehow— helped them communicate better; Scarlet told me programming for those pilots was always easy. I've seen her code. I've used some of the underpinnings for the code we use now. But since JENOVA and the kaijuu are—' Elena stopped. She couldn't.

'Since they're genetically related,' Tseng finished for her, 'like a mother and her sons, you're telling us _now_ , years later, that all the SOLDIERs were Drift compatible with kaijuu.’

'Yes,' Hojo said. 'And do you want to know what Genesis and, by extension, Sephiroth saw?'


	2. Interlude - Errata from Shinra’s propaganda files

**Geography**

Some of the greatest impacts of the war were simple re-workings; facts turned inside out like a sock; negative images. Before the war, east was east and west was west: you wouldn’t find a world map made by a decent cartographer that’d look different from any other. Then the kaijuu came, and while cardinal directions never change, what was East and what was West soon flip-flopped. The breach made the great ocean the centre of everyone’s universe.

 

 

News media and propaganda both found it very hard to superimpose images of kaijuu ( _and_ Jaegars) onto an ocean that was cartographically cut in two, so more or less overnight the map of the world offset itself just enough to — disconcertingly — place Wutai at the centre and — alarmingly — Midgar to the West.

At first, it was media for print and broadcast that did this: everyone else stuck to the maps that they had on their PHSes or on their walls and on the networks. But, slowly, as kaijuu alert notifications started to ping out to everyday people, their technology and their geography changed, too. Memorials that were erected often used the new map. Then PHS applications started to use it too, since it made sense to do so. Eventually, map makers jumped on the bandwagon, projecting attack frequency maps and density maps and migration coverage all in the new form.

No one knew if the old maps would ever be used again.

 

**Recruitment, Early War**

 

Back when Category IIs and IIIs were the worst of anybody’s problems, and when the Jaegar programme was brand new, recruitment posters were — upon reflection — hopelessly macho and very polished. The most commonly seen one in the archives was a we’re-all-in-this-together depiction of Turks and SOLDIERs and Army all squished into a single poster, everyone surging forward to meet some out-of-frame kaijuu. No Jaeger silhouettes — back then, they were still huge, clunky, and industrial, nothing polished enough to brag about.

Instead, it was the pilots that were front and centre, all of them still in divisional (or, to be more accurate, departmental) uniform. The combined army hadn’t been established yet, nor had the old, too-recognisable uniforms been replaced with the sleek and Shinra-free insignia that would come. The poster screamed Shinra at its cockiest: a manufacturing behemoth bullishly rearing forward to meet the engineering challenge of the century, led by flash and bang young men. This was before Rufus’ father was crushed beneath the left hind leg of the first Category IV to make landfall; a time when SOLDIER was SOLDIER and the Turks were the Turks and the Army was a bunch of sad sacks under a still-corpulent Heidegger, lurching from crisis zone to crisis zone whenever they weren’t trying to build the one cannon in Junon to rule them all.

It’d worked, for a while. The new recruits, drawn to images of Generals Sephiroth and Genesis and Angeal drifting together, swapping partners at will, and punching monsters in the face, were a gil per dozen. They had all the time in the world to run simulations and sit side-saddle alongside the Jaeger crews; recruits got to see how engineers sitting in the heart of the Jaeger, fifteen feet or more below the control pod, had to suffer the same g-forces as the pilots while making sure that the whole mako reactor heart of the thing didn’t overheat and kill everyone. They got to endure hours of long-winded lectures on weapons systems. They got to _specialise_ ; some learned how to programme, others went into strategy.

It all mostly fell apart when the biological research teams discovered that anyone and anything associated with the JENOVA project - in other words, anything that had JENOVA cells in it - was, to put it kindly, fucked. It wasn’t obvious at first: at first, it just seemed as though materia-based attacks against kaijuu were becoming less and less effective, and that the rangers were getting more and more fatigued. Everyone attributed it to the fact that the kaijuu were getting bigger alongside how the neural load needed to pilot increasingly sophisticated Jaegers. It didn’t occur to anyone that they were adapting; and that they were adapting so quickly because the kaijuu were ultimately genetically identical to JENOVA.

The clusterfuck that was the _Teufel_ mission was what sent the message home. It was team Genesis-Sephiroth, essentially undefeated, taking on a new type of Category IV; it was an enormous fight. People actually couldn’t wait to see it on broadcasts when it was announced. They’d got used to winning, and to seeing a lightshow. It turned out that the new species of kaijuu didn’t play very nicely with SOLDIERs. Within ten minutes of engagement, Genesis was out of sync, chasing some rabbit no one could see. Sephiroth was too busy trying to stop a few hundred thousand tonnes of metal from falling into the ocean to know when to duck when the kaijuu came.

No one really knows how the General felt when  _Teufel_ delicately ripped open the front of their control pod like it was an especially well wrapped present. It didn’t take out either Genesis or Sephiroth: it just opened the podface. Genesis was, going by what the black box recordings could afford, well and truly out of his mind by that point. Screaming, trying to disconnect from the pod, falling in and out and in again of Drift with Sephiroth. Sephiroth himself managed to lock the Jaeger for long enough to try and wrestle his partner back to sanity, but whatever the link was between the kaijuu and rapidly decaying JENOVA Project-G, it was a lot greater than the bond between friends and partners.

From Sephiroth’s partial account of the incident, Genesis did manage to wrench himself free. He’d just walked out of the pod and straight into the face of _Teufel_. Apparently, Sephiroth claimed that he’d never seen his partner that at peace since before the war began.

In any case, Genesis must not have completely lost his mind, since the only reason why Sephiroth survived was that the kaijuu imploded from the inside: fiery materia fire licking it up from the guts to the shell. It was the first time in two years that a materia-based attack had worked, and the last time it ever did. There wasn’t a body to be found.

Sephiroth never recovered. Only Professor Hojo now has access to the full files from the General’s debrief, back when he was still inside of his own head for more than just a few minutes a day. The decay process of JENOVA Project-S was not an easy one to watch.

In any case, the SOLDIER programme was immediately disbanded. President Rufus Shinra, only a few months after inheriting the much-damned position from his deceased father, shut down SOLDIER entirely; had all JENOVA remnants destroyed; the labs razed. Angeal, the last really effective SOLDIER, was very much on board with the process: so much so that the man/clone/kaijuu (there were many discussions about what JENOVA clones were in the days following the public fallout) went into Hollander’s old lab, and immolated himself and everything in it. Other SOLDIER took less drastic routes, but none remained at Midgar HQ. Director Lazard resigned by means of bullet through the roof of his mouth.

There would never be a recruitment poster like this one from the early war period. There would never be any more Shinra rubberstamping of propaganda — literal rubberstamping, since all posters back then were approved by seal in order to ensure that dissident literature didn’t get mixed in. The Jaeger symbol took over as the public face of the company, and any adoring depictions of pilots were limited to the very human members of what used to be Administrative Research.

**Recruitment, Late War  
**

Late war posters were very different, and included very different types of recruitment. By then, Director Tuesti had risen up the ranks as being one of the most vocal, well-known, and well-regarded members of a Shinra that was trying its best to reform before the world came to an end. The Director was one of the only ones who saw his department name go unchanged, though he was famously quoted in the boardroom for having said, “Of course we should leave it as Urban Development - what else should it be? Project Get-The-Fuck-Out-Of-Here?”

In any case, Tuesti was one of the few executives who really knew how to recruit, and _who_ to recruit. Besides Science and Weapons’ thousands of engineers, scientists, technicians, armourers, mechanics  &cs., there were many other vital positions that both needed to be filled and that paid relatively well while affording the person employed the best healthcare/rations/lodgings available for anyone who didn’t already own a bunker in the mountains. Tuesti needed railway workers, steel millers, farmers — a thousand kinds of people for a thousand kinds of jobs, most of them far less glamorous than piloting a Jaeger. In any case, the Jaeger programme was now mostly at a stage where it desperately attempted to separate Drift-compatible wheat from the chaff. Training was a luxury no one could afford, and producing Jaegers was almost like engineering one consecutive miracle after another.

So recruitment shifted its target to something more achievable: the common man. The people who used to hate Shinra, but who needed the company so desperately to stay alive. It was a rehabilitative relationship that involved the Company keeping people off the streets (and therefore from rioting or creating terrorist/revolutionary organisations and such) while simultaneously benefiting - for once - from treating its employees right. 

The doors were opened to anyone and everyone. Women flooded into factories; people clamoured to help build a rail line to Kalm. The shadow of a Jaeger, the one universal symbol of hope and joy for most, graced every poster. The posters themselves became simpler, hand-painted, less glossy, more easily printed. They sprang up on the doors of speakeasies and cafeterias and union employment agencies and on the walls of homes: a visual representation of the best that anyone had to offer at the very, very worst of times.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Disclaimer: Being no artist myself, I want to full-on disclaim that the above images are remixes and mashups. This was a hold-no-prisoners concept art throw-together, and I painted over, manipulated, referenced, copy-pasta’d anything from a bunch of resources, all of which are listed [here](http://karanguni.tumblr.com/post/86059179172). Mostly, I wanted to remix in old World War art, and also fiddle with maps because I love maps. I apologise to anyone whose eyes I might’ve seared due to these poor reproductions.


	3. Defence

They moved the conversation to the table. While Veld looked mostly impassive after his brief outburst, Hojo saw that Tseng was tense; he was leaning against the far wall, closed in on himself. He and Sephiroth had become, in a manner of speaking, relatively close before the  _ _Teufel_ _ disaster. Genesis aside, Tseng’d been one of Sephiroth’s chief Drift partners; one of few who’d managed to take and keep the job of inglorious understudy to the three SOLDIER Generals.

'Have any of you,' Hojo asked, taking his eyes off of the ex-ranger, 'ever wondered why Shinra never deserted Midgar?'

'Always with your rhetorical starts,' Veld sighed, but he played along. 'It's a strategic base - why _would_ we desert it?’

'You've been at war too long,' Hojo clucked at the Director. 'You forget what it's like to think like a civilian. What's Midgar besides a disaster zone for its millions of citizens?'

'Most of them left,' said Elena, frowning, but she looked uncomfortable even saying so.

'But many of them stayed,' Hojo retorted. 'Loyal to a fault, maybe, but more likely too poor to buy their way out on the expensive transports to safety in the mountains. Heidegger, our sainted father of logistics, tells me that the wait list for a pubic rail ticket is now about 6 months long. That's a long time to wait in the shadow of kaijuu.'

'We do our best,' Veld said evenly, with the practised voice of a man whose main preoccupation these days was drumming up enough good press to hire a few more Drift candidates. 'But even Shinra has limited resources.'

Hojo shrugged. ‘I’m merely pointing out that, if we’d been better people, we would’ve established our multi-billion dollar army base somewhere less populated.’

'You're telling us we stayed in Midgar for a reason,' Tseng said flatly. 'Just tell us what that reason is and get over with it, Professor.'

Hojo looked over the bridge of his glasses at Tseng. ‘I liked you better when you were a Turk,’ he said. ‘You were far more deferential.’

Tseng bowed his head, ironic.

'We stayed for two main reasons,' Hojo said. 'First and foremost, only Midgar had the mako reactors we needed to power the Jaegars. With AVALANCHE and the WRO tearing everything else down —'

'Get to the point, Professor,' Tseng murmured, crossing his arms.

'While reason two,' Hojo continued, 'is that Midgar was the only place that had the life-support facilities necessary for keeping a critically injured SOLDIER alive. J-project compatible mako-based IV systems don't just fall from the sky, if you pardon my choice of metaphor.'

He waited for them to connect the dots. A moment later, Elena’s eyes widened briefly. ‘He’s alive,’ she said slowly. ‘You’re telling us that Sephiroth is alive, right now, two _years_ after _Teufel_?’

Hojo inclined his head.

Tseng pressed his lips together into a very tight line, but he wasn’t speaking. Hojo could practically see the thoughts forming in his head as the ex-pilot turned to face Veld. ‘Director,’ Tseng asked very evenly, ‘when you asked Hojo earlier what he’d made Sephiroth into  _now_ — you knew, didn’t you?’ 

Veld said nothing.

Tseng slammed a fist onto the table top, making paper flyers with his face on them scatter everywhere on the floor. ‘You _knew_ that Sephiroth was alive when they pulled the wreckage in?’

'I didn't know that he'd drifted with the _kaijuu,’_ Veld said, voice absolutely calm. ‘But yes. I knew he was alive. I thought it best that you, and every other pilot, did not find out what condition the accident left him in.’

Veld was the world’s best keeper of secrets, and watching him divulge information to one of his own pilots was, in Hojo’s view, excellent street opera. Tseng simply looked at Veld in angry askance. Veld nodded in Hojo’s direction. ‘If you want to know why, you can ask him yourself.’

'It always comes down to me, doesn't it?' Hojo laughed at the deflection. 'You're as much responsible for the Jaegar programme as I am, Veld, but _I_ have to answer all the hard questions? Fine. Let me. What Veld doesn’t want you to know, ex-Major Tseng, is that we _did_ pull Sephiroth from the wreckage alive. Many would have also called him insensible.’

He took his glasses off and wiped them, clean though they were, against the rough-spun fabric of his overalls. ‘He was babbling, occasionally grunting out noises that seemed to form language one moment before dissolving back into incoherency the next. Every neurologist we had thought he’d die before the hour was up. I suppose most of them still think he did.’

'But he didn't die,' Tseng surmised.

'No,' Hojo said, looking down at his now even dirtier glasses. 'He didn't.' He paused. 'He lived. For the first two days it was all more of the same. Monitors beeping constantly as his brain tried to fry itself alive, but his genetic make-up enabled him to keep going. By the third day, he was putting together sentences. I still couldn't move him from the laboratories, but he was speaking. No one asked any questions. In their opinion, Sephiroth was dead — and who can blame them?' Hojo put his glasses back on. 'General Sephiroth was a construct: a winner of battles against evil, an eloquent and charismatic general in Shinra's recuperative war. A Sephiroth who couldn't speak, couldn't pose, couldn't fight — that was no Sephiroth. _That_ was just a failed experiment.’

Hojo cast a look at his silent audience, and wondered if they were feeling sympathy for the devil. It made him smile. ‘But Sephiroth isn’t  _just_ a failed experiment. What, my dear people, do you think our early warning system comprises of?’

Elena blinked. ‘Scientists scribbling on dry-erase boards, and radar?’

'Bless your heart,' Hojo said to her. 'But no. We have an early warning system that can tell when _kaijuu_ are due to drop _before_ they do, and that takes more than complicated echolocation and an army of useless physicists.’

'It's Sephiroth,' Tseng said, looking hard at Hojo. Elena put her hand over her mouth. Veld looked away. 'Since he drifted with the kaijuu, he must have some way of knowing.'

'What Sephiroth and Genesis saw that day,' Hojo acknowledged, 'was that the _kaijuu_ hive mind. That’s why all their genetic material is identical: kaijuu are _created_. They’re dispatched, very likely by some aliens that don’t like us very much. Ever since _Teufel_ , Sephiroth has been connected, by Drift, to that system. He sits alone in the basement of the last remaining SOLDIER laboratory — which happens to be in Midgar — and _babbles_. Every now and then, we can parse the babble down into a location and a category. And every time we do, we find that it corresponds exactly with new events.’

'I…' Elena said, looking pale. 'I use that data every day and I never knew.'

'Few people ask questions about where useful things originate,' Hojo said. 'You're Shinra; you should know.'

'Useful things always cost something, though,' Tseng said. 'What was the price for this, besides Sephiroth's sanity?'

'The Drift goes both ways,' Hojo shrugged. 'While Sephiroth can sense the _kaijuu_ , the _kaijuu_ can also sense him. And so we turned Midgar into a magnet _:_ millions of lives put at risk in exchange for the information needed to save them.’ He didn’t give them time to digest that fact. ‘Which brings me to why I am here: last week, Sephiroth reported something we’ve never heard before — he predicts that a double event is going to occur.’

'Two drops?' Tseng said, eyebrows raised.

'Two; one of them of a category that we haven't even classified yet,' Hojo confirmed. 'And Reno's dead.'

Tseng inhaled sharply.

Hojo reached into the bag he’d brought and plucked something out. It was a scrap of fabric: shoulder sleeve insignia indicating the rank of active-duty major. He threw it at Tseng. ‘So you can sit here in the caves of Kalm,’ Hojo told him, ‘or you can accept a demotion of sorts and get back into the service again, Colonel. What will it be?’

Tseng looked at Hojo; Hojo cocked his head to the side. 

Tseng closed his hand over the patches.

'Welcome back,' Hojo said. 'Now pack up your travelling circus. We've got to get you out of your dress uniform and back into the suit.'


	4. Operations - Sensors

**Operations.**

'There's going to be an honour guard,' Elena mused aloud. 'Scarlet's already knows that Major Tseng is coming back to HQ; there's no way the entire Shatterdome isn't up in arms by now.'

The four of them — Veld, Tseng, Elena and Hojo himself — were squeezed, quite unceremoniously considering what they each amounted to, together in the armoured vehicle and enduring the long and dusty ride back west.

'Oh, there'll be a veritable parade,' Hojo agreed from the passenger's seat. 'The mako core engineers will be tying streamers to the top of fork lifts. The air support crew won't be able to contain themselves.'

'Stop,' Tseng growled from the back.

'Did you know?' Hojo asked the car at large, cheerfully. ' _Colonel_ Tseng is one part of the only ranger team alive to _not_ have driven their Jaeger to reactor meltdown?’

'Please stop,' Tseng repeated.

'He's certainly the only non-genetically modified pilot to have as many successful drops as he does,' Hojo went on. 'What was it, on the day he was discharged — my apologies, the day he retired? Eighty-seven?'

'Eighty-eight,' Elena said, before shutting her mouth quickly.

'Stop antagonising Tseng,' Veld said from the back.

‘ _You’re_ the one who made him a walking pamphlet, Veld,’ Hojo said, voice hardening. ‘I’m not antagonising Tseng; I’m telling him that he’s going to be received like a hero, and that he’d better have the appropriate face on when we walk onto base.’

Tseng snorted. ‘If you think I’m going to be your marionette, Professor, you’re hugely mistaken.’

'You're not _mine_ ,’ Hojo said. ‘I never had any interest in you. I still don’t. But who you _really_ belong to are the million or so people still in Midgar who’ve said your name over the last five years like it’s some sort of prayer. Tseng, deliver us from evil. You’re the face on every poster, the idol of every recruit, the fucking beacon of hope in dark fucking times. I also know that, without Veld to pull your strings, you’re a hopelessly passive individual who probably privately wishes that he were still a Turk, bruising knuckles in back alleys for the sake of Shinra’s bottom line. Don’t we all. Those were simpler times. But right now, you’re going to walk into the Dome, and you’d better fucking _smile_.’

The car trundled on. It went over a bump. It continued trundling.

'Well,' Elena said finally. 'That was quite the pep-talk, Professor.'

'I'm practically inspirational,' Hojo agreed.

Nobody spoke the rest of the three hour ride back to Shinra.

 

* * *

 

Tseng walked into the bay, and smiled while doing so.

Around him, hundreds of amassed welders, logistics men, air crew, janitors, cafeteria women, signallers, sappers and god knows who else clapped. Some even cautiously cheered, and when not chastised they broke out into loud hollering. Hojo didn’t stay around for the effusive tour, headed by Elena herself, of the new Jaegar’s capabilities. He went straight for the control room. 

'This is not a good time to talk to the Major,' Veld told Hojo, catching him at the elevator bay as the professor waited for a lift up. Veld always knew where to stand in ambush; it was what made him such a great recruiter. 

'It's never going to be a good time,' Hojo retorted. 'It never has been. These free-range, independent thinker types don't like it when Shinra men come looking for them.'

Veld looked at Hojo evenly; it was a very reproachful gaze. Hojo just looked right back. ‘You could be the one to have the conversation with Kris about how he needs to work with his ex-partner again, or you can let me handle it. Would you like to be my guest, Director?’

The elevator dinged in announcement of its arrival. Veld wordlessly stepped out of Hojo’s way.

'I thought so,' Hojo murmured, and stepped inside.

 

* * *

 

The moment Hojo walked into the control room, the Major turned to his gaggle of defensively-converging lackies and snapped, ‘Everyone get out.’

They — his army of navigators, scientists, translators, programmers and techies — filed out one by one in a slow line. If looks could have killed, Hojo would have been dead fifteen times over.

'Say what you want and then get out,' the Major told him, wheeling into the centre of the control room. Sitting amidst a sea of cables and screens, he was the only organic thing in the middle of an open metal heart.

It wasn’t a bad way of thinking about Kris. The ex-pilot hadn’t been the softest of touches even when he’d been riding the wave of unprecedented success by Tseng’s side, and both age and disability had only hardened him farther. Not everyone who fought in the war had been part of Shinra originally — how could they have been? Wars took people, and so very many of them. Kris happened to be one of the few outsiders who’d clawed his way up the nepotistic ranks of Shinra’s Jaeger empire, but it didn’t mean that he was in any way more of an insider now than he had been a decade ago. Mostly, he was a cog in the machine: when his legs had broken and his partnership with Tseng had fallen apart, Shinra kicked him out of the Jaegar programme. In another life, they would’ve just abandoned Kris and his shattered legs on the side of a street. But they were better men now, apparently, so when Kris demanded to stay, to learn the ops room, to keep going, they’d let him. No one had expected him to actually survive the process, but he had.

'Major,' Hojo said, imbuing no irony at all into his address. Hojo could respect outliers and overperformers, deviant as they were. 'I know you don't want to see me.'

'What I want doesn't matter,' Kris said, his fingers curled loosely around the wheels of his chair. He'd never gone for a motorised one; he'd simply disciplined himself into wheeling his broken body everywhere around the Dome until the crews had ramps built onto any and every raised surface. 'I didn't want to end up in this chair. I didn't want to have my partner listen to me scream as my legs broke. I didn't want to see Tseng's face on every poster every day of the goddamned rest-of-my-life, but I did.'

Hojo leaned against one of the supercomputers and waited it out. He let his eyes wander over Kris’ de facto uniform: it was, of all things, a black suit, cut from the cloth. Hojo idly wondered if the Major wore it just to spite Shinra, or if it was because of some ridiculous attachment to his old partner, or if it was just because a suit in a world of overalls _meant_ something.

Kris said, ‘I don’t want to see Tseng dragged back to the Dome to fail to Drift with every single fucking recruit from here to Kalm. I don’t want to listen to you. But I will — just say what you want, Professor,’ he said, becoming resigned. ‘I see your fingerprints all over this fucking debacle; no one else would try something so fucking ridiculous as _bring Tseng back_.’

Kris looked up at Hojo, calm in his fury. Hojo did the best he could for the man: he reached into his bag and withdrew the drop forecast report that he had told the others about. ‘Two simultaneous drops in three week’s time,’ he said.

The Major took the papers from Hojo and flicked through them. ‘Well fuck,’ he swore. ‘Why haven’t I heard of this before? The report’s dated four days ago.’

'Because I wrote the report myself,' Hojo said. 'From personal sources. Not the analog-nuclear-radar-echolocation crew of physicists you employ.'

'Ah,' the Major said succinctly. He cleared his throat. 'I'm guessing you have some master plan.'

'No,' Hojo said. 'I only got one of our best pilots back in time for a brief retraining, built a new Jaeger ahead of schedule for him, and am having this tortured conversation with you _for fun_.’

Kris laughed, because he was ultimately perhaps as much of a bastard at heart as Hojo himself. The professor smiled in return. ‘I need you to be willing to put the past behind you. No more accepting Tseng’s excuses that “no one else is good enough.” No one else is going to be good enough an _operator_ for the job except you,’ Hojo told him.

'Why would Shinra want another operator?' Kris asked without looking up from the report. Hojo could practically see the information being assimilated into him. 'I haven't been off-shift for a drop for four years.'

'Well,' Hojo said, deferring for half a moment. Then he said, 'How good is your Wutainese?'

 

* * *

 

 

**Sensors**

 

'I see you're back, you lazy, skivving bastard,' Scarlet greeted Hojo as he entered Engineering Bay 7, freshly released from his discussion with the Major. 'I'd ask if you'd accomplished everything you wanted on your little trip, but the results speak for themselves.' She gestured with the calibrating device in her hand up at the _Beowulf_. ‘Look at it. It has cannons now; honest to god ones that shoot lasers.’

'Dear Scarlet,' Hojo said fondly, coming to stand next to her. 'What would you have done if not for the war? You'd have had to start one yourself.'

'I could've, probably,' she mused, running her palm down the flank of the Jaegar's big toe. There was a love and pride in that motion that she never allowed into her voice. 'Maybe even would've. But that's a moot point,' Scarlet laughed. 'Now I'm one of the most well-respected women — persons, really — in Gaia. You know that little online rag that the surviving yuppies keep up? The one that pretends to be an objective news source? They have an actual list, because they have time for that kind of thing. I outrank you, and Reeve, and even Lockhart.'

'Why wouldn't Weapons outrank Engineering?' Hojo asked drily. 'After all, all _we_ do is put little wheels on your big cannons that shoot actual lasers.’

'Jealousy is such a bad look on you,' Scarlet clucked, handing him the calibration tool and a thick set of papers on a clipboard. 'Anyway, we've been waiting for you an entire eight hours. If you delay your final systems check any longer, the teams are going to end up polishing this thing to a blinding shine. Good job on Tseng, by the way.'

'Thank you. It remains to be seen if he's still any good in the suit.'

Scarlet scoffed. ‘He’s old Turk material; retired or not, they don’t take the suit off. I’ve got candidates for him lined up out the door.’

'Won't be necessary,' Hojo said, starting in on the check list.

'What?'

'Won't be necessary,' Hojo repeated. 'If I'm right, Tseng's Drift partner's not going to even be from this continent.'

Scarlet pressed her lips together unhappily. ‘This is about Rufus fucking off to Wutai, isn’t it? It’s about Rufus, and it’s about the dead-drop carcass we hauled in a month ago.’

'Perhaps,' Hojo said evenly, clicking and unclicking his pen.

'Why don't you _tell_ me these things?’ Scarlet demanded.

'Because I could be wrong,' Hojo shrugged. 'Then we really will need a thousand candidates lined up outside the door, since not too many people like to go on missions that sound an awful lot like suicide runs.'

'I give up,' Scarlet said, throwing her hands up. 'This is a new era of Shinra, they say, one in which we have transparency and accountability and a policy of no-doors interdepartmental information sharing.'

'Some things should never change,' Hojo said sweetly. 'Now come on; this list is 500 pages long.'

 

* * *

 

'Biggs, Wedge,' Hojo said with some exasperation. 'We don't have the resources to “make a bigger laser”; I've gone over this with you two a thousand times.'

'But all the reactor capacity that's going to the legs,' Biggs objected. 'Surely we can spare _some_ of it?’

'Surely,' Hojo drawled. 'Yet, not at all. Go away,' he told them, spying Cid, their prodigal aerodynamics chief, out of the corner of his eye. 'I have bigger fish to fry.'

'Professor,' Cid greeted him stiffly as Biggs and Wedge scuttled out of range. Hojo thoroughly enjoyed watching the tortured expression of badly-disguised hatred on the man's face. 'About the special pod you wanted built into the back of R-Leg. We're done with it — I just finished the final ejection tests. It works.'

'Cid,' Hojo said warmly, just to watch the man squirm. 'You needn't be so formal. We have, after all, been working together for almost half a decade now. Since Shinra handed this position to you on a platter.'

'Well,' Cid said, body language all locked up. 'Maybe it's just me in this day and age, but people better remember that what Shinra giveth Shinra also damned well taketh away.'

'So your little plane project was scuppered a lifetime ago,' Hojo said. 'What were you going to do? Spend the rest of your life sulking and hating Shinra? Now you build enormous robots that walk through a metric mega-tonne of ocean like it's air.'

Cid, with remarkable composure, looked Hojo right into the eye, said, ‘All _I_ ever wanted to do, Professor, was build _planes_ ,’ and walked away.

 

* * *

 

When he was two-thirds of the way into the list, Hojo took a break from the systems check and wandered away from the _Beowulf_. It was, he reflected, good to be home, insofar as the Shatterdome was where a large proportion of Midgar’s working population ate, shat, and slept. 

He walked from Engineering’s cavernous, echoing bays into the lower-ceiling working blocks. Their dome was built on a tower model, adapting Reeve’s old design for Midgar. It was essentially an enormous cylinder split into several sectors; bays were in the hollow middle while pilots’ quarters, executive offices and labs towered in the open-plan floors above. The lower and ground levels were for support and personnel services. Subterranean levels were home to the mako reactor infrastructure that kept the whole thing running.

Suspended from the dome’s enormous rafters was the drop clock. It kept the time since the last _kaijuu_ attack. The clock was practically an institution unto itself; its red LED numbers a devilish beacon of hope one moment and a cruel _memento mori_ the next.

Shinra’d experimented, for a while, with having every run down of the minute marker accompanied by a subtle clicking noise; a sort of reassuring, subliminal reminder to everyone that a moment had passed without attack. That changed a year later, when the Dome’s psychologists and psychiatrists sat down for an internal review of the general state of mental health on-base and discovered a trend: a large number of operatives had, understandably, developed insomnia that only went away when a white-noise generator was active in the room. Paranoia sat like a weary ghost on most people’s shoulders. Rufus had the clock set to run silently, and it still did. Hojo wondered if the problem had actually ever been solved: everyone still cricked their necks to look up at the timepiece every other other minute.

Still, it was good to be home.

Hojo was just returning from the cafeteria when a booming announcement informed everyone on base that the President was to be on deck in fifteen minutes.

'News comes from the east,' Hojo murmured to himself, and detoured to the base's western entrance to take a look.

Around the entrance, everyone was standing a little straighter, pulling rumpled uniforms into order, milling about. In perhaps one of the greatest ironies birthed by the _kaijuu_ invasion, Rufus — once just Shinra’s upstart brat princeling — now really was _the President_. People hung his banners in almost every city on the Planet; most out of genuine respect, others out of a sense of relief that  _someone_ out there was taking responsibility for this whole war. In a roundabout way, the _kaijuu_ let Rufus rule by fear and, much like his father, he’d become an unimpeachable wartime president.

Hojo stayed for long enough to see Rufus, the only man in a world of oil, tar, and coal brave enough to wear white, step into the Dome. They’d speak later. The professor returned to the Engineering bay.

 

* * *

 

It was almost four in the morning by the time Hojo properly finished with the systems check. He wasn’t ready for bed, so he gathered his personal effects — still sitting in a corner of one of the workshops — and headed up to the sensor labs.

The second graveyard lab shift was just starting. ‘Professor,’ the lab manager on duty greeted him with yet another stack of papers. ‘The prediction reports from while you were gone. We’ve also got two RAs who need… time off from transcription duties.’

Not many RAs lasted long in transcription. Hojo wordlessly took the reports and gestured a dismissal at the lab manager. He sat down with them at his desk, looking through the gibberish. The lab’d worked on a language parser for a while; some way to take whatever they recorded from Sephiroth and eliminating noise. It hadn’t worked very well. Too much of what came out of Sephiroth’s mouth was based on tone or on memory. None of the research assistants — most of them young, wartime young — knew enough about Sephiroth’s personal life to make much good sense of the material. So they’d abandoned the parsers, and just had RA after RA sit in front of a monitor and transcribe the mutterings that came out of Sephiroth’s dark, mechanical cell.

For a while, Hojo puttered. He scanned the reports. He logged the predicted two-drop event into the base’s system proper. News of it would hit the ground by 0700 and then there’d be mild chaos. Good.

Finally, when he couldn’t put it off much longer, Hojo took his bag and headed to the sealed door on the far side of the lab.

'Don't disturb me,' he told the lab manager, who nodded and made himself busy elsewhere. Hojo unlocked the door and stepped into Sephiroth's cell.

'Hello,' he called into the dim light. Sephiroth was, in many ways, blind at this point; so much of his vision had burnt out during the _Teufel_ crash, and what was left of his eyes was extraordinarily sensitive. The muted light from the status indicators of the varied life-support machines in the room was all the illumination there was.

A guttural _,_ rasped _hello_ echoed back at Hojo. _Hello hello hello._

Hojo went to the side of the room where a set of brushes — metal tined, boar-bristle, so many types and shapes — was kept. He selected one, and walked around the machines to stand behind the curled and shrivelled creature who had once been Sephiroth.

'Your hair,' he admonished quietly, taking up the limp but bright grey-white strands in one hand. For all that muscles had atrophied and sight had been lost and bones reorganised, Sephiroth's hair had retained some of its old glory.

For a long while, Hojo just stood there alone in the darkness and brushed long, long strands into a dull sheen. Only Sephiroth’s belaboured breathing and occasional, alien grunting filled the room.

Every now and then, Sephiroth’s fingers flexed sharply, and his wrists would jerk against the padded restraints that kept him pinned in position. Weak though he was, his strength remained unpredictable. Hojo, when he was done brushing out his son’s hair, worked Sephiroth’s fingers in between his hands and massaged some small warmth into the cold muscles there.

At last, just before he left, Hojo reached into his bag and withdrew the small, now much-crushed bag containing the buns he’d bought from the market in Kalm.

'I'm sorry it's stale,' Hojo said. He took a bun, broke it into small pieces, and lifted a section to Sephiroth's dry and papery lips.


	5. Jaegermeisters - Tactical

**Jaegermeisters**

 

'This is where you all get out,' Kris informed the Ops room at large when Tseng walked in through its doors. Nobody moved. 'This,' Kris said evenly, 'is not daytime television.'

'What's daytime television?' one of the programmers, a post-war brat, asked.

'Get the fuck out,' Kris repeated. Everyone moved. Tseng just stood there at the door, waiting as people shifted past him, eyes wide, everyone looking backwards.

Kris could practically hear their simple, stupid thoughts: when was the last time that the Major and Tseng had been together in the same room? Had it been that catastrophic drop; the one that had crushed Kris’ legs and ruptured Tseng’s left eye? The one that saved Midgar, again? Did they talk? Did they write? Did they fucking do each other’s hair?

The last one out of the room was Elena, who had the good grace to shut the door after herself. Kris, still seated at the primary console, closed his fingers slowly around the armrests of his wheelchair.

Tseng pushed himself off the door jamb and came over. Standing up close, he had to look down to meet Kris’ eye. ‘Hm,’ he said. ‘This is an awkward position.’

Kris, fingers bone white, said, ‘What’s awkward is that you never liked blow jobs.’

They looked at each other. Kris’ neck ached, so he looked away first. He could see Tseng’s fingers twitch, as though the man wanted to reach out or do something equally stupid. Kris turned his wheelchair around to face the console.

'You're wearing a suit,' Tseng said, stepping up so that he was side-by-side with Kris instead of staring down the back of Kris' neck. Good, because Kris would've rolled over Tseng feet if he'd done that.

'Mm,' Kris hummed in agreement, putting his hands gently over keyboard in front of him. 'It's Harrondale, done by the old man himself.'

'He still tailors?' Tseng asks, something a little like amusement in his voice.

'End of the world wouldn't and didn't stop him,' Kris shrugged. 'I didn't know he did work for the Turks until he asked me if I wanted _my_ suit in _your_ designs.’

'Heaven forbid,' Tseng murmured.

They fell back into silence again as the both of them watched the bustle and rush of work on the engineering bay floors down below.

'What are you doing here,' Kris asked finally.

'Hojo,' Tseng said immediately.

'Of course Hojo,' Kris said. 'Why did you say yes this time?'

'Double drop should be reason enough for anyone,' Tseng said. 'I also know a mission has to be better than running recruitment.'

'You've run recruitment perfectly well the last five years.'

'If by that you mean that I've watched young men and women sign up for military positions that almost inevitably end in death or disablement.'

'What's wrong with being disabled?' Kris bit out.

'What's wrong with being dead?' Tseng snapped.

'Not the same thing,' Kris said.

'Not the same thing as having a fully-functional body, either,' Tseng said.

'So what?' Kris asked, still staring out at the floor. 'They can run just that little bit faster before they're crushed underfoot by the next Cat III that drags itself out of the Abyss?'

'The Jaegar programme isn't an answer to the problem when the problem _spawns continuously_.’

'You never had a problem with the Jaegar programme before you lost the eye.'

'You never had a problem acknowledging simple facts when you still had your legs.'

'What would you rather us do, then?' Kris snapped. Five years, practically, since he'd last seen Tseng, and all they could do now, predictably, was fight. 'Build a goddamned cannon? Build a goddamned _wall?_ Don’t make me laugh.’

Tseng said nothing. Kris slammed a fist into the control panel. A staticky voice came through the intercom a second later. _Labs here. Did you need something, Major?_

 _‘_ How about two fucking functional legs? _No_ , I don’t need anything,’ Kris growled, killing the connection. He stopped himself, breathed, looked down at his hands. Kris opened and closed his right hand; fisting, unfisting, fisting, unfisting. He flexed his fingers, and then set his hands back onto the armrests of his chair.

A long moment later, Tseng ran a finger down the control panel. ‘It hasn’t changed much.’

'Software's more important than hardware in Ops,' Kris said. 'Unlike with rangers.'

Tseng huffed a laugh. ‘Well, then you’ve been putting that university education of yours to good use.’

'I was a chemist,' Kris said.

'I know,' Tseng said. 'I was in your head for most of the war.'

'Half of the war, now,' Kris said quietly.

'Ah,' Tseng said. 'Yes.'

Kris exhaled. ‘You need a tour, at least of what’s changed.’ He gestured at the primary console. ‘Ops. Veld trained me, so the protocols are largely the same.’ That was all Kris had to say, and all Tseng needed to know. Kris wheeled backwards, then headed to the side of the room. ‘Programmers are here; Elena’s optimised our newest Jaegar so that remote sensing handles more of the navigation. Pilots can worry less about piloting and more about finishing the drop. Should be useful, considering your eye. Don’t,’ Kris said, as Tseng reached out to touch the back of his wheelchair. ‘If you were thinking of pushing me anywhere.’

'Kris,' Tseng said. 'Your wheelchair doesn't even have handles. I couldn't push you anywhere if I wanted to, which I don't.'

'Good,' Kris said harshly.

'Why are you angry at me for coming back?' Tseng asked.

'I'm not angry at you,' Kris replied.

'You're talking three times more than normal,' Tseng pointed out.

'You have no idea what normal is like any more,' Kris spat. 'Those recruits you feel so badly about sending to death or disablement; you're not the one in the operator's chair helping them along — I am. You're the one who put on a dress uniform and fucked off because you couldn't find it in you to Drift any more.'

'I did hear you scream,' Tseng said, his voice too even. 'That first and last time you ever screamed was _in my head_.’

'That's not the reason you don't Drift,' Kris said. 'You've heard tens of men scream in pain before; most of them died at your hand.'

'No,' Tseng said sharply, control finally slipping. Neither Tseng nor himself were normally short-tempered, but then again they'd always brought out the best in each other. Kris laughed into Tseng's face. 'No,' Tseng repeated himself, grabbing Kris' chair by the armrests and physically hauling it over so that they faced each other. 'I didn't Drift again because no one else was good enough. Does that soothe your ego?'

'A Turk telling a civilian that he won't Drift because _no one else was good enough?_ ' Kris pantomimed. 'Don't make me fucking laugh, _Colonel_ ; and don’t you dare make me your reason for turning tail and running with your two functional fucking lower limbs.’

'Fine,' Tseng said, unexpected.

'What?' Kris said, deflating.

'Fine,' Tseng said again, walking across the room to a small antechamber; the Drift systems test area. 'Wheel your broken body over here or I'll do it for you.' He was yanking two Drift helmets down from their shelves. He tossed one onto Kris' lap as Kris came closer. 'If we can barely talk to each other, any drop I do that you operate is going to be a complete failure. Put it on.'

Kris put one hand on the helmet. Tseng already had his on.  
'My head,' he said evenly, 'isn't the healthiest place in the world.'

'Nor was mine, when you first got into it,' Tseng said.

Kris put the helmet on. He reached for the control panel, set the timer for three minutes. ‘If you chase the rabbit,’ he told Tseng, ‘the techs are going to find us on the ground, frothing at the mouth. Think about what that’s going to do for both our images before you tell me this is a good idea.’

'The only rabbit I need to chase has broken legs,' Tseng said, and he hit the button to engage before Kris could object.

The worst and best part about Drifting with Tseng again, Kris would acknowledge to himself later, was that for a brief few minutes, he could feel his legs again. Five years of memories crushed through the both of them; Tseng flipped through his head as Kris picked through Tseng’s archival brain. His partner had always had a near-mimetic memory; Tseng had a way with remembering things in all five senses that differed completely from Kris’ own analytical thinking. Kris felt the too-smooth wool of the dress uniform the first time Tseng had put it on; the feel of Tseng running a finger against the red line that ran down the pants leg. He smelt the soot of burning Midgar: the first recruitment Tseng had done was in the City after two consecutive Cat IIIs had breached the coastline. He saw the face of the first sign-on; a girl with dark hair and beautiful eyes. He heard fight after fight with Veld. He saw darkness in one eye. He felt the absolute boredom of travel; the guilt that flared up every time Tseng pinned on the epaulettes indicating the rank of colonel; the exhaustion of late nights on the road; the loneliness; the memory of memories, of a two-person bunk on the upper floor of the Shatterdome, the walls freshly fucking painted because they had been so much younger when the war had begun.

Kris remembered that bunk. He remembered that bunk: right down to the sub-80 threadcount of the old sheets they had been given, a world away from what he’d been brought up with on the Plate. Kris remembered that bunk, the feel of bedsprings through the thin mattresses, the feel of the bedsprings on his knees, his working knees, his legs, his fucking and functional cock.

'Don't,' Kris heard Tseng say, and jolted right down his spine because for the first time in five years this wasn't just _his_ memory alone. Kris wondered, a split-second thing, about a world in which Drift technology were demilitarised; how many people would live in each other’s heads, remembering? Hundreds of thousands of civilian lives changed by a war that everybody only ever wanted to forget.

Kris hauled himself out of the memory; that old fantasy.

He was gasping for air when the Drift was terminated three minutes later. Blindly, he reached for Tseng’s arm, then in a fit of instinct grasped his way up to the eyepatch over Tseng’s left eye and ripped it off. He pulled Tseng, equally jelly-limbed, down to him, but Kris couldn’t kiss him, could only press his forehead against Tseng’s sweaty forehead and press his fingers against Tseng’s eyelids and feel the deadness under his right thumb; the deadness and the wetness.

'No wonder,' he panted.

'No wonder what?' Tseng asked, voice shaky.

'No wonder why the recruits, whenever they Drifted with you, never looked me in the eye. I thought,' Kris said, laughter bubbling uncontrollably to the surface, 'it was because they were afraid of me.' Kris pulled himself back and put his right hand against his face and just laughed and laughed and laughed. He heard Tseng laugh as well. Then all they could do was laugh, the two coldest men in Shinra; laugh because the coldest men in Shinra didn't cry.

 

* * *

 

 

**Tactical**

 

The summons to a debrief came early, delivered in the form of a loud banging on dorm doors at first shift. ‘President Shinra wants you in the tactical room by 0800 sharp,’ some lackey shouted through Hojo door.  
  
The professor deliberately dressed in the most stained and damaged of his overalls and allowed himself a leisurely stroll across the slowly-waking Dome. Rufus had left no person unsummoned, by the looks of it; by the time Hojo got to the tac room, every on-base Director was already present and waiting. Elena and the Major, representing Ops, sat together conversing in low tones. Tseng, the sole pilot present, leaned against the far wall.  
  
Scarlet, bless her, was in a pre-war dress as red as her name. She’d always been able to smell blood in the water; she knew Shinra’s best didn’t get woken up at 7 in the morning for anything short of an apocalypse. Hojo slid into a seat at the table next to her.  
  
'How much of this is your doing?' she asked him without preamble, eyes bright as she took in Hojo's attire.  
  
'I only do what I must,' Hojo demurred. 'Just that, with a double event on the horizon, there's quite a lot that must needs doing. But be quiet, our dear leader approaches.'  
  
Rufus came into the tac room, dressed in his impractical but pristine whites. The war had changed everybody else’s attire, but not his. He was unguarded — no Turks for the famously popular wartime President — though not unaccompanied. Scarlet whistled at the sight of Godo Kisaragi striding in. ‘You sure know how to collect them all, Hojo.’  
  
'He's the Grand Marshal of Wutai,' Hojo shrugged. 'Don't you think that it makes sense for wartime allies to talk face-to-face?'  
  
'There's theory,' Scarlet said slowly, 'and then there's real life.'  
  
'I've always been good at practical application of theoretical possibilities,' was all that Hojo would say.  
  
'When we're done with the war, forget science and engineering,' Scarlet laughed. 'Go into politics. You'll build entire empires.' She motioned with a pen, encompassing the room at large. It wasn't inapt, considering how many of them Hojo had personally brought into this operation.  
  
Rufus and Godo took their places at the front of the room, an accidental study in opposites. In contrast to Rufus’ urbane whites, Godo was in crisp military fatigues, a dramatically modernised version of the armour that the Wutai Army had worn during the fighting against Shinra. (Nobody called it the _war_ any more; the debacle with the kaijuu had obliterated all other wars from memory.)  
  
Hojo let his eyes wander, for just a moment, over to Tseng. The pilot’s once-languid pose was now stiff, though he disguised it well. Hojo smiled a private smile.  
  
'Good morning. I trust our guest needs no introduction,' Rufus addressed the room. 'I will get straight to the point: this debrief is about the double event predicted to occur four days from now. The details are in the reports,' he nodded at the pile of thin folios being handed out, 'the most important point being that, for once, the drop zone will be considerably closer to Wutai than it will be to us.'  
  
'Normally, Wutai would have handled this double event ourselves, since we have more resources and Jaegers than Midgar,' Godo continued where Rufus left off. His note of nationalistic pride did not escape Hojo's notice, though it wasn't unfounded. The _Beowulf_ was the only fully-functional Jaegar in the Midgar Shatterdome; another, previously piloted by the Rude-Reno team, was still in pieces, and the final remaining unit was in Junon standing feeble guard before the ruined port. Wutai, by comparison, had a captive population that hadn’t been able to flee behind the solid bulk of a mountain range; said captive population made for cheap and plentiful industrial labour. Their Shatterdome had four filled bays.  
  
'But,' Godo went on, 'President Shinra came to me two months ago with a discovery: a _kaijuu_ that had emerged from the breach dead.’  
  
'Rufus sent the dead drop to Wutai?' Scarlet hissed at Hojo, outraged. 'When did we start sharing?'  
  
'If you think Wutai's supply of steel comes just from the Western continent alone, you're very naive,' Hojo muttered back. 'Besides, I'm no geneticist any more, am I? It had to go somewhere for analysis. Pay attention.'  
  
'Our scientists conducted a full physical and genetic analysis of the dead _kaijuu_ and found that it had been significantly damaged by a nuclear blast,’ Godo said. ‘We came to the conclusion that the only possible way that could have happened is if someone managed to get a bomb through the breach — possibly someone from the planet that the _kaijuu_ attacked before our own.’  
  
'Sir, that's impossible,' Tseng interjected. 'We've tried that before. The breach closes against anything that isn't a living _kaijuu_. We’ve even tried explosives in _kaijuu_ offal. Nothing works.’  
  
'Well,' Godo started to answer, then turned to face Tseng. He stopped short upon seeing who had spoken; Godo's eyes flicked up towards Tseng's forehead then back down again. Hojo watched the knowledge of what and who Tseng was register on the man's face. 'Your President assures me that what he has planned _will_ work,’ the grand marshal said at last, looking as though he’d been made to swallow something unpleasant.  
  
'And what, exactly, is this plan?' Veld broke in, drawing Godo's attention away from Tseng. Godo shook himself as if to clear his head and gestured for Rufus to elaborate.  
  
'This will be the first — and hopefully last — pilot collaboration between Midgar and Wutai,' Rufus said. 'The general plan is as follows: the four existing Jaegers in Wutai will provide a defensive guard while our one Jaeger makes a sprint to the breach. Breaches open and shut within fifteen minutes on average; it's no coincidence that the _Beowulf_ was built for speed. Professor Hojo informs me that there is a pod containing a… significant nuclear payload that can be ejected into the breach.’  
  
'Perhaps I should repeat myself,' Tseng said. 'Nothing that isn't a living _kaijuu_ gets through the breach.’  
  
'How fortunate for us,' Hojo spoke aloud, addressing the room for the first time, 'that _kaijuu_ live among us.’  
  
Tseng’s jaw clicked shut. He looked away. No one from Shinra spoke for a long minute.  
  
Godo did not feel equally compelled to stay silent. ‘Do you mean to say that one of the monsters from your SOLDIER project is still alive? I thought they all went mad and killed themselves.’  
  
'Yes,' Hojo said into the dead silence of the room. 'One of the monsters.'  
  
'How convenient,' Godo said, slapping the table in satisfaction. 'Strategic genius, really, to keep them on hand.'  
  
'Strategic genius?' Hojo asked, dangerously. 'No. Strategic folly, in many ways: since SOLDIERs share a neural link with the _kaijuu_ , they act as homing beacons to the ones that emerge from the breach. Let’s not forget the little debt of honour that Wutai owes Midgar: we have taken the brunt of the _kaijuu_ attacks; over 70% of them come East, leaving your Shatterdomes intact and relatively undisturbed. But thank you, Godo Kisaragi,’ Hojo finished, words smooth and sharp as a dagger. ‘For lending us aid now in our shared time of need.’  
  
'Hojo,' Rufus said sharply.  
  
Hojo subsided, crossing his arms over his dirty overalls.  
  
'If anyone's interested in seeing a real work of genius,' Scarlet spoke off-handedly, 'the schematic for the nuclear device is on page three of your handouts. You're all welcome.'  
  
Hojo snorted aloud.  
  
'Thank you, Scarlet,' Rufus said wryly. 'I believe the schematic will be self-explanatory. Which leaves us with the matter of pilots. Tseng will be representing Midgar, naturally—'  
  
Tseng cut in. ‘You said representing _Midgar_ ; presumably you want me to Drift with somebody from Wutai. Who is my co-pilot?’  
  
'Me,' said Godo Kisaragi.  


* * *

  
  
The debrief ended not long after; Hojo left Rufus and Tseng to fight between themselves and instead escorted Godo Kisaragi to Operations, where the grand marshal was to do a Drift calibration with Tseng in an hour.  
  
'What do you think, Professor Hojo?' Godo asked him. 'Do you think the two of us will be compatible?'  
  
'Tseng is a soldier in wartime,' Hojo replied. 'He'll do what he's ordered to.'  
  
’ _Hojo_ ,’ Godo murmured. ‘That’s an Wutai name as well, isn’t it?’  
  
'As much as _Tseng_ is one, too,’ Hojo said coolly, and left the grand marshal to his own devices in favour of heading to the sensor labs.  
  
His lab manager greeted him with a grim face. ‘Professor, the latest transcripts — they predict another double event. This one just two days out from the one coming up. Professor?’ he prompted when Hojo did not take the proffered report.  
  
Hojo took the papers and crumpled them, one sheet after another. ‘It won’t matter,’ he told his lab manager. ‘I’m relieving you for today. Tell the transcription teams not to come in starting tomorrow.’  
  
'Professor?' the lab manager asked, confused.  
  
’ _Do what I say_.’  


* * *

  
  
Engineering and Weapons had a send-off party for the _Beowulf_ that night. It was to be choppered out across to the Western continent the next day. Word had trickled out of the mission the way word always did in the Dome, and a mass of engineers had come together to say goodbye to Midgar’s last line of defence.  
  
'Does this make any sense, Professor?' Biggs asked Hojo as he hauled a truly impressive crate of moonshine into Bay Three. 'Leaving Midgar without a single Jaeger?'  
  
'There's the _Black Chocobo_ ,’ Hojo said.  
  
'The _Black Chocobo_ is, if you don’t mind me saying sir, in worse shape than a stupid kid’s science project,’ Biggs said mournfully.  
  
'Let me put it this way, Mr. Biggs,' Hojo said, reaching for one of the bottles of moonshine. 'If this mission fails, there'll be other double events. Then there'll be triple events. Something about _kaijuu_ blood is altering the chemical composition of the ocean and making it easier for more and more of them to make it past the breach. At that point, not having a single, barely weaponised _kaijuu_ in our Dome will be the least of our problems.’ Hojo cracked the bottle open and held it out.  
  
Biggs took it. ‘Yes sir,’ he said, saluting Hojo, and took a long draught straight from the neck. He paused. ‘I never thought I’d say this, but it’s been a pleasure working for you.’  
  
'Don't try so hard,' Hojo drawled. 'You're a lousy liar.'  
  
Scarlet came up to him as Biggs wobbled away. ‘I thought you might want to talk,’ she said to him. ‘But then I realised what a stupid proposition that was, so I came to bring you this instead.’ She had a bottle of champagne dangling from her hands. ‘It’s real, pre-war stuff. Remember when we used to pop bottles of it into Rufus’ face just to make him made?’  
  
'That angered him. And then he tried to take over the company by puppet-mastering a terrorist organisation,' Hojo reminded her, but took the bottle without objection.  
  
'Wouldn't want to work under any other kind of president,' Scarlet cooed. She gazed up at the Beowulf. Hojo stood next to her and did the same. 'As much as its still a piece of shit,' she said, 'I've become very fond of it.'  
  
'I could say that about a lot of things in my life,' Hojo murmured.  
  
Scarlet cast him a sidelong glance. ‘We’ve loaded the pod with the payload,’ she said, turning away again and looking up at the pod in question. ‘There’s plenty of room left over for—’  
  
'Everybody tonight is trying so fucking hard,' Hojo swore, spitting.  
  
Scarlet said nothing for a while as she tapped her heeled feet against the ground. She’d swapped out her boots the same time she’d swapped out her cover-alls for the dress; Scarlet stood like a surreal vision from Shinra’s hedonist past amongst the workers of her present.  
  
'Get into a crane,' she said eventually.  
  
'What?' Hojo snapped.  
  
'You're clearly not going to be drinking that,' she nodded at the bottle. 'So why not christen this bitch the way things used to be done?'  
  
Hojo looked at her; Scarlet looked back, unfazed. Hojo got into a repairs crane. Scarlet piloted them up, one storey and then another, then another until they were face to face with the pod. Hojo looked at it, mind blank for the first time since he’d put this entire project into motion. The bottle he gripped tight and unyielding in one hand.  
  
'Ladies and gentlemen!' Scarlet shouted down to the bay below, leaning out precariously over the edge of the crane's box. The massed crowd shouted and clapped up. 'Tomorrow, we welcome the beginning of the end of the end of the world. But tonight,' she said, turning back to look at Hojo for a brief moment. 'Tonight, we're still men and women fighting to survive. We've fought long, and hard, and without knowing when we might ever rest or see peace.'  
  
Hojo exhaled.  
  
Scarlet, hair down and dress bright, blood red, lifted an arm. The crowd below wailed like an animal. ‘But there will be a tomorrow where we will rest,’ she yelled. ‘And we’ll drink to that tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow!’  
  
Hojo smashed the bottle against the Jaeger, and watched as glass and champagne exploded everywhere before falling and falling down.


	6. (Seismology)

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Prequel chapter(s?) will be in (parentheses).

They were advancing down the northern tip of Wutai, retaking old land that was already, in Shinra’s eyes, theirs.

‘This is a bunch of crap,’ Zack complained. 'Why are they sending _you_ , the greatest General to ever General, to pick off little villages fighting little fights when we’ve _already_ won major battles here?’

Sephiroth quirked a shoulder up in a shrug. 'We have enough generals fighting other, bigger sorties that aren’t nearly as hard as this is.’ He waved a glove hand in the air, carving out the rough shape of a battlefield. 'In an open fight, there’s us on one side. Them on the other. Numbers, really: you just have to take down more of them than they do us, until losses become unbearable and they surrender. We have better training, an open supply line, and organisation-’

Zack held up both hands. 'Okay, okay, if I wanted to read the _Art of War_ I would have brought a copy along with me to help me get to bed at night in my bunk.’

Sephiroth smiled; a small motion that transformed his face. 'SOLDIER generals are good at daisy-cutting down infantry. Infantry-fought battles are therefore easy. But to win a long war, you have to make sure that resistance doesn’t creep back up behind your rear-guard. Small groups can snowball into great phalanxes, and unfortunately SOLDIER generals are _less_ good about fighting guerillas that dart in and out of ever-moving bases: _that_ requires a little bit of subtlety and also a little bit of brutality.’

Zack did the maths. 'So, Genesis would just set the entire fucking mountain range on fire while Angeal wouldn’t know where to begin?’

'Something like that,’ Sephiroth nodded, taking Masamune - sheathed, thank god - and tapping Zack very gently on the right shoulder with the flat of the blade. 'Don’t sell your strategic genius short, SOLDIER Third Class Fair.’

Zack rolled his eyes. 'All right, sir. They get to have tanks and stuff, we get to camp in the mud in the middle of creepy forests in the middle of winter.’ He saluted Sephiroth idly before he could be rebuked for sass and went off to help the poor sops who were trying to lay down camp on the miserable terrain. At least there were only ten or so of them, and they could move quick, far more quickly than the under-trained and under-equipped Wutainese whom they were smoking out.

After a lousily thrown-together dinner ration, Zack sat with Sephiroth in front of a non-light burning mako stove. Unless the rebels had infra-red equipment, they weren’t going to see their camp, and in any case Zack was willing to trade the tactical advantage of surprise for having toes that weren’t made of icicles.

'Ever feel like you’re forgetting why we fight?’ he asked, staring into the forest.

'No,’ Sephiroth said, after an oddly long pause. 'We were made to fight, and win. Look at this place-’ he said, leaning back slightly and glancing down the line of their camp and at the darkness that threatened to swallow them all up. There wasn’t a light to be seen for miles. 'Backwater country that has never had reliable electricity or medicine. Every Wutainese regiment we’ve seen has tried to rely on materia alone to heal their injured: depending on how many - or few - skilled users or trained stones they’ve got, they lose as many as two-third because they’re just too far from a base. Half the guerillas we fight have never seen the capital, don’t speak the same dialects. I doubt Kisaragi would be able to communicate with them even if he _did_ know who they were, where they lived, and _how_ they lived.’

Sephiroth nudged the warm, dark heater with one booted foot. 'When we’re done, when this war is over - there’ll be reactors along the whole north-western spine. There’ll be research centres and maintenance centres and vocational centres to train those we need to help run them, and once the lines are laid there will be even more than that.’

Having finished the equivalent of a speech, Sephiroth fell silent.

'Huh,’ Zack said, choosing not to mention that the reason why Wutainese fighters were so far from bases was because Shinra was bringing the frontlines further and further out, or that maybe the company didn’t need to fight a _war_ just to build reactors. 'You really do believe in bringing brighter futures, huh?’

Sephiroth said nothing.

—-

Zack was 17, and Sephiroth only four or five years older, when the Planet quaked beneath their feet and a roar thundered up toward the skies.

'What the hell was that?’ Zack asked, scrambling up from his camp pad. 'Bomb? Trap? Earthquake?’

'We’re not on a seismic line,’ Sephiroth said, already up himself and looking, of all places, west. 'That wasn’t from anywhere close to us.’ His eyes were almost aglow in the dark; brighter even than Zack’s were. He picked up Masamune and raised his voice in an order. 'Radio the helicopters to our location.’

'General,’ the Second in charge of transport objected. 'That would reveal our position.’

'I know,’ Sephiroth nodded, still looking west. There were still tremors, like aftershocks. 'Do it anyway. I have a… feeling.’

The choppers came screaming silently over less than half an hour later, eating up the one-day hard march’s worth of distance in no time at all. Sephiroth had them _all_ load up, and then made the pilot take them up high, high as they needed to be to get a good view out in the direction that the initial shock had come from.

'Holy…’ Zack said as they watched a monster, a nightmare march towards the western shore. The northern tip of the continent was thin, almost an archipelago: it would be on Wutai in no time at all. The radios were screaming with incoming transmissions; all confusion. 'What the hells is that thing? And whose _is_ it?’

Sephiroth leather glove creaked on Masamune’s hilt. 'I don’t think,’ he said, eyes fixed, 'that it’s on _either_ of our sides.’

—-

Wutai had, critically, hesitated. Maybe they’d wondered if that first _kaijuu_ had been some sort of Shinra experiment gone wrong or gone right. The moment it made landfall, they threw the closest three regiments they had at it. Guns and spears and pot-shots of materia. It was like tossing chum into a feeding frenzy.

It did, however, buy them all enough time for the Planet to shudder beneath them a second time.

Aerith, in a post-mortem, would tell them all that that was the first of the WEAPONS - Sapphire WEAPON. The Planet’s most primal defence system, a monster meant to fight other monsters.

Zack watched as WEAPON and _kaijuu_ clashed, each strike rattling the ground. WEAPON managed to pull the _kaijuu_ off-shore and into the near-deeps, and for a long while they were two twisting, dark monoliths in the unlit ocean that sent huge waves inland. Not a few men drowned in those first _younami_ monster-waves.

Sephiroth had them put down just out of range of the worst of the water, and they hauled Wutai fighter after Wutai fight into the choppers and dropped them off again further inland. It was the first of many evac-missions; Zack knew a lot of those surviving men ended up working in one or the other of the Domes as search-and-rescue.

They stopped when WEAPON went still. They couldn’t see what had happened; a fly-over when it was light the next day would show that the _Hatsu-no-Shishi_ had sunk claws deep into WEAPON’s skull. Still, they could _hear_ it, the wet in-and-out exhale and inhale of air into great cavaties. It was coming closer. Zack watched the waves lap up and up and up, licking towards their feet.

'Turn on the search beams,’ Sephiroth told them, ordering an end to the evacuations. 'Point them out towards the sea.’

The _Hatsu-no-shishi_ was almost dead when Sephiroth went out, blazing and brave, into that dark ocean as _kaijuu_ blue and mako green stirred and mixed into perfect teal. Maybe that should have been the first sign.

But it didn’t matter. Masamune flashed in the darkness, and Sephiroth was faster than the injured beast could react to. It still tore a long line down the General’s left leg - proof that even when almost down it was not out, and that no SOLDIER would, alone, be able to fight it on even terms.

But that didn’t matter, that night: Sephiroth slew the beast, and saved - to everyone’s amazement - not just his entire Shinra regiment but all of the Wutainese ones as well. He saved the _capital_ ; if the _Hatsu-no-shishi_ had been unchallenged, it wouldn’t have taken it an hour to get inland enough to raze the Kisaragi’s finest buildings to the ground.

After that, the War was something else, and it shared the same, singular name on either side of the great sea. It wasn’t the _War in Wutai_ or the _Shinra Invasion._ It was the Outsider War, at first, and later just _the_ War. The Great War.

And, for a long, long time, the ones who fought - and won - were SOLDIERs.


End file.
